Information relayed by mass media outlets has a way of being taken for granted by the public as true. This would be fine if all news sources were neutral and unbiased when reporting on the issues they address. But when the media reports issues in a negative or stereotypical way it can feed into social stigma.

What often follows then is social distancing and discrimination. In relation to issues involving public health, including mental health, these discriminatory behaviors set up an “us versus them” dichotomy and some of our most vulnerable become susceptible to dehumanization.

What we call reality has both socially constructed and scientific components. The socially constructed nature of reality adheres to the idea that we as individuals subjectively make sense of the world which is then filtered through individual experience. But from a scientific view for every effect–there is a direct cause.

A combination of both of these approaches leads to what we in the practice of mental health care call the biopsychosocial approach which is a more holistic and balanced approach to treatment. Borrow too heavily from either the biological, psychological, or social components in the public discourse and discussions get murky. We lose balance.

What are the types of issues up for debate in public healthcare? They are issues such as: Should individuals experiencing a mental crisis be involuntarily admitted? Should inpatient treatment be favored over more community-based approaches? How much should self-determination and consumer participation come in to play when providing services?

We must take into account that reporters and experts alike speak from a privileged place as evidenced by the fact that they have access to a broader audience. They are often influenced by competing interests with ties to financial gain. Knowledge becomes produced and shared to maintain a practical end.

The sharing of knowledge becomes a type of competition for attention with the ultimate aim of the construction of a common reality for the public. This structure is played out in polemical social representations or the ways in which social aspects of society are portrayed as opposites. Public discourse stagnates.

The stagnation effect is due to expert disagreement on the nature of the problem or the best way of tackling it with each side pointing out the ridiculousness of the other’s argument. Conflicting opinion from reporters and experts alike necessitates responsibility on the part of the audience then to decipher and vet the credibility of those speaking along with matching the advice given to one’s own personal experience.

The audience develops an imaginary interlocutor that engages as the public debate plays out in audience minds. The audience is at once asked to rely on expert opinion and the factual presentation of events independent of personal experience while at the same time learning the message of the inability to trust experts whose opinions often conflict.

But who is right?

Rather than buying books by the experts, or rather in addition to buying books, many consumers have taken to the internet to ask advice on forums such as reddit, twitter, facebook groups, and quora––it seems everyone is an advisor thanks to technology’s democratizing effects. However, social media sites can also be places of comment wars and negative social comparison.

Spending greater amounts of time on social media itself has been cited as a precursor to symptoms of clinical depression–an example of the very thing discussed in this post with expert opinion varying. As modern society has become more complex with a complexity of discourses, the struggle for the attainment of legitimacy by expert opinion when speaking on complex issues makes sense as there is no longer an appeal to one singular ideology.

In fact, there are a multitude of experiences and worldviews and therefore a multitude of ways of finding meaning and truth. Though dominant discourses still exist–still in order for innovation to take place–stakeholders need to speak from a more emancipated and empowered way.

An empowered way of speaking is de-centered from pointing out social injustices and places its focus instead on dialectical thinking and conflict resolution. We as a society place value on the ability to show strength in overcoming adversity and we admire those who demonstrate resilience.

Similarly, we place value on those who achieve what they can with what they have been given in life. Both of these constructs place value on action. Action is important, but so is being. And the core of what it means to be human is being human.

As the saying goes, existence precedes essence. And by existing and interacting with the world in which we live–through the public discourse or via other means–we define who we are. We are the meaning-makers.

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Monica A. Ross, LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor in private practice in Austin, Texas. Monica can help you to foster resilience. To schedule your appointment with Monica, you can reach her at (512) 572-0055 or request an appointment with her on the Empathic Psychotherapy Scheduling Calendar.

What else did I find when I went searching on this personal journey for the secret sauce of resilience? I found time and again the repetition of the importance of having a sense of purpose. Emily van Deurzen an existential psychotherapist emphasizes that many people come to therapy searching for meaning. I’ve definitely observed this in my own practice.

And it is important to note that while certainly we are no longer living in the middle ages and by religious rule, still, people turn to religion for meaning. According to the Pew Research Center (2012) eight in ten people in the world identify with some form of religion. The most practiced religion in the world is Christianity.

Having been raised in the Christian faith, I can attest that Christianity’s aim is to offer up a sense of meaning and purpose. And maybe in part it is a sort of crisis in faith that brings people into therapy at times. The therapist’s job then is to help people make sense or meaning out of life’s seemingly meaningless and random events and to work within the context of the client's spirituality or anti-spirituality.

Meaning in life does not have to be tied to spirituality. Wasn't it Garrison Keillor who in gest said "It was a Lutheran town. Everybody was Lutheran. Even the atheists were Lutheran -- it was a Lutheran God they didn't believe in."

If the goal of making meaning could simply be put to gain greater understanding about the why things happen in life, then purpose maybe is more of a how to act based on the meaning that we find. Conversely, when we find no meaning, I believe that facilitates action as well and can sometimes lead to fatal consequences.

There is a favorite quote I have by a political dissident named Vaclav Havel. An article that I cite below from The Nation expresses it well “ ‘Whether all is really lost or not,’ Havel explained in one of his letters to Olga, ‘depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.’ “ (Crain, 2012).

But when a person is living in scarcity and battling things like lack of housing, lack of transportation, lack of employment, lack of money--it is easy to get caught up in ruminating thoughts. I've definitely experienced this myself. Those thoughts may go something like "How did things came to be the way that they are? Rumination is a bouncing back and in fourth in our minds about the causes and the consequences of events.

It’s the next step of asking "For what purpose?" that people may gain relief or at the very least come up with their own answers about purpose that help to make things make sense.

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”-Václav Havel

When we think about best performance practices amongst athletes and billionaires again, a sense of purpose. Elon Musk one of the billionaires I’m referring to talks about not being in the car business, but in the business of wanting to make an impact—that’s passion and purpose. Purpose is both making sense of the past—for what purpose did this happen? But it also has an eye towards the future in terms of my purpose in life is _____(fill in the blank).

While I began to think about these people coming from adverse backgrounds and how they became resilient I began to think that maybe this encouragement to become resilient is dumbed down a bit. Why just resiliency? Within success lies a component of resilience, in other words in order to be successful one has to be resilient.

But there is a place beyond resilience even, a place of truly high performance. Maybe that is what all of these successful entrepreneurs had in some sense achieved. And what do they have in common or what insights can we glean from their experience? The article below in The Nation explains.

I want to talk a little bit about existential psychotherapy since it is another modality I lay claim to operating within. For existential psychotherapists, a primary concern in working with clients isn’t so much about focusing on defects due to mental illness or flaws in character or personality. What existential psychotherapists want to get at in working with clients is to assist the client in uncovering where the client draws meaning and purpose in life and to encourage the pursuit of that meaning and purpose. Existential psychotherapy takes into account the fact that we all exist here on this earth and therefore have challenges in life to face as a result. But for each of us our existence precedes our essence.

That before each of these statements about a person comes the verb “are”—people “are.” We exist. That’s the starting point for all of us.

In a way, we are thrown into this existence.

And because we exist and because human life is finite, the task becomes then to make something of our existence despite all the things that may have been thrown upon us at birth. For example, we may have been born into poverty, we may have been born with a genetic defect, we may have been born male/female, etc.

Existential psychotherapy concerns itself with four dimensions of existence in particular—the physical, social, personal, and spiritual—and each of these dimensions has its own paradox. We break that down like this.

Physical

At some point we will physically die. If we deny that our existence is finite, we run the risk of wasting the life that we have. If however, we keep within our awareness the idea that we will one day cease to exist, we might be motivated to live our lives more fully.

Social

The paradox of the social realm is that we exist on this planet with others. Our option is to either live in conflict or cooperation with them. Because we are aware of our separateness, we can develop the capacity to relate and respect the separateness of others. At the same time we are individuals with a need to be part of a greater whole.

Personal

In the personal realm we discover that there are no hard and fast rules to life and that we all have vulnerabilities. Because of that, taking on personal responsibility becomes of way of creating rules for ourselves. If we deny our vulnerability and refuse personal responsibility we might lose the strength and stamina that come from the freedom to choose.

Spiritual

We develop our own value systems outside of the context of absolute truth and this is where we relate to that which is unknown. We make up our own ideas for the reasons for our being here on earth and determine for ourselves what we believe to be right or wrong. Here, too, is where we create meaning and where we find purpose in life. This is where we get our worldview.

This type of therapy is very future focused. It acknowledges that the past, though seemingly fixed, is in fact changing because our view of the past can change over time. In addition, life presents a certain amount of ambiguity and uncertainty and the goal often becomes developing the ability to tolerate the anxiety that this may produce.

For existential psychotherapists the mind and body are connected and not functionally distinct. In other words, it’s not so much that we have a body but that we are a body. We are also connected to the world we exist in so that how we think about ourselves is often a reflection of our experiences with our environment and how we interpret the outer world.

Because life is in constant flux and ever changing, the meaning that we make of our lives is also in flux, but to be able to make meaning of the life that we are in is an essential thing. The loss of a sense of meaning in life can lead to depression.

We are all born into the world with assumptions and biases that influence our actions. The first step is to become aware that we have biases. That having been said, it is possible to do reality checks to verify our assumptions. This fits very nicely with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) which aims to look at evidence for and against negative core beliefs that we might have.

For more information on existential psychotherapy see Emmy van Deurzen’s work. Much of the information contained in this post comes from a class I took on existential psychotherapy with Skills in Existential Counselling & Psychotherapy by Emmy van Deurzen and Martin Adams as the text.

The following are existential authors taken from one of Emmy’s presentations.